Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Altice completed its previously announced acquisition of Cablevision Systems, the leading MSO in the NY metro region.

Cablevision together with Suddenlink will form Altice USA, the #4 cable operator in the U.S., which serves more than 4.6 million Optimum and Suddenlink customers across 20 states. The deal was valued at $17.7 billion. BC Partners and CPP Investment Board hold a 30 percent stake, as previously announced.

Introduce a state-of-the art and fully evolutive, all-in-one home center that integrates the functionality of set top boxes, routers and Wifi modems in one device and provides a more user-friendly experience;

Invest more into and support the WiFi network, which will further extend the reach of broadband offerings;

Upgrade existing and invest into new IT systems to optimize processes and better serve customers; and

Inspire the next generation of technology leaders through programs that encourage the pursuit of STEM-related career paths.

Patrick Drahi, Founder and Controlling Shareholder of Altice: “The completion of the Cablevision acquisition marks a critical step in the development of the Altice Group. Altice USA is a key pillar of our business and a powerful and dynamic growth platform. We are very excited about our U.S. business and the opportunities we see in this market. We will accelerate network investments and bring innovative products and services to U.S. customers by leveraging our global operational expertise, scale and resources. I wish to also thank the Dolan family for entrusting us with their life’s work at Cablevision, where they have developed under their pioneering stewardship one of America’s pre-eminent cable operations with best-in-class management talent.”

Altice, the second largest communications company in France, confirmed plans to acquire Cablevision, the fifth largest cable operator in the United States. Under the agreement, Altice will pay $34.90 in cash for each Cablevision share, for an enterprise value of approximately $17.7 billion. The transaction is to be financed with $14.5 billion of new and existing debt. Altice has received full financing commitments from JP Morgan, BNP Paribas and Barclays.

Cablevision serves the New York City metropolitan area, passing more than 5 million premises and serving more than 3.1 million residential and business customers. With approximately 65% of its cable customers subscribing to triple-play services, Cablevision generates industry-leading ARPU and benefits from high customer loyalty. The deal also includes Lightpath, the company’s business services unit, as well as local news operations.

Earlier this year, Altice announced plans to acquire Suddenlink for $9 billion, a cable operator based in St. Louis with 1.4 million subscribers in 17 states. The combination of Cablevision + Suddenlink will make Altice the fourth largest cable operator in the U.S. with 4.6 million customers in 20 states.

“As a family business we are proud to be entrusted by the Dolan family with the ownership of Cablevision and look forward to continuing the pioneering path they have paved for us. The strategy of Altice in the large and highly strategic US market is reinforced with the acquisition of Cablevision. We will be in a stronger position, as in all other markets in which we operate, to deliver the best services, invest in the most advanced technology, and develop innovative products for the benefit of our customers,” stated Patrick Drahi, Founder and President of Altice.

In 2014, Altice acquire SFR from Vivendi, combining it with Numericable, which has over 5.2 million fiber homes in France, with more than 10 million homes passed. SFR has 3G/4G mobile networks in France as well as 1.6 million fiber homes.

Quanta CloudScale Reference Architecture for Docker Datacenter: integrates leading Docker open source projects including Docker Swarm, Docker Engine, Docker Trusted Registry and the Docker Universal Control Plane. The company said that by combining the full container stack of Docker Datacenter with Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform software and QuantaGrid D51PH-1ULH hardware, enterprises are provided with an easy to install, datacenter solution for containers that runs on standard x86 datacenter-class servers and starts with as few as four nodes.

ContainerX CloudScale Reference Architecture for Windows and VMware-based container environments: combines ContainerX software-defined compute and networking with Hedvig software-defined storage in a single management interface to deploy containers for stateful and stateless applications that function across bare metal, Windows, and VMware-powered server infrastructure.

ClusterHQ CloudScale Reference Architecture for high availability databases: Hedvig is expanding its ClusterHQ Flocker plugin with a reference architecture designed for highly available (HA) stateful services using Docker Datacenter. It provides a complete recipe for taking advantage of the management capabilities of Docker Datacenter while using the flexible storage environment provided by Hedvig via the Flocker volume plugin for Docker. Hedvig and ClusterHQ are working on expanding the reference architecture to enable Kubernetes and Apache Mesos in addition to Docker Swarm for container lifecycle management.

“Our customers are adopting containers using many different approaches—ranging from wholesale integration of Docker tools to augmenting existing VMware and Windows environments,” said Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder of Hedvig. “Data becomes a critical consideration in these environments as modern storage must be highly elastic in order to adapt to constantly changing business needs. CloudScale Reference Architectures remove the guesswork and burden of getting these infrastructure stacks right. Our tested partner solutions harness the power of distributed systems to provide enterprise-ready solutions regardless of the container adoption approach.”

Juniper Networks is enhancing its Contrail product line to enable Docker and container networking. New capabities will provide abstraction and automation of network segmentation and security, allowing the creation of the assignment of different groups of Docker containers to different virtual networks.

Juniper said Contrail Networking can now integrate with container orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, and enables automated network segmentation across Kubernetes ‘pods’ using annotations like ’name’ and ’services'. Virtual Networks are securely isolated closed-user-groups. Contrail Networking infers app intent and creates virtual networks to securely isolate app tiers and permits cross tier communication only as per app deployers' specifications. Read the full article.

Aqua (formerly named Scalock)is rolling out enhancements to its Container Security Platform, including:

A native Jenkins plug-in -- adds an Aqua Security step to the CI pipeline that enables organizations to automate container image security scanning, report within the CI/CD tool on vulnerabilities found, and allow/disallow the use of images according to policy.

Integration with HPE’s next generation application lifecycle management (ALM) solution, Octane, allowing development teams to view how their pipelines have fared in security testing, and to set rules as to what constitutes a “pass” mark.

Environment variables encryption -- protects container “secrets” by encrypting environment variables. As images are updated, pushed and pulled from the registry, any sensitive data (such as passwords) – commonly referred to in developer circles as “secrets” - are automatically encrypted.

Avi Networks announced full integration with Docker Swarm, the native container clustering orchestration solution for Docker. AVI said its integration with Docker Swarm enables a dynamic service fabric for micro-segmentation, service discovery, graphical application maps, load balancing, and autoscaling capabilities across thousands of Docker nodes. The Avi Vantage Platform leverages native cluster management for Docker to help developers deploy and scale microservices applications across thousands of nodes in the cluster.

Avi Networks and Mesosphere introduced an integrated solution to help enterprises build and deploy microservices applications at scale using Docker Containers. The Avi Vantage Platform works with the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) and Docker containers to provide a dynamic service fabric for micro-segmentation, service discovery, graphical application maps, load balancing, and autoscaling capabilities deployed across thousands of...

Splunk is adding support for Docker environments to its Operational Intelligence platform.

Splunk will now be able to provide insight into metrics and events on Docker containers, as well insight into administrative changes by consuming and analyzing data from Docker Universal Control Plane.

Continuous Insights covers the entire delivery pipeline, giving contextual actionable insights by correlating data from across multiple tools in the pipeline. The platform is available for Docker and Kubernetes ecosystems. It also supports Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“We are excited to raise the bar in the industry with a compelling hyper-converged infrastructure solution that runs the new Microsoft SQL Server 2016 software -- the most virtualized database in the industry,” said Anand Jayapalan, vice president of SanDisk client and enterprise compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. “Our collaboration with HPE and VMware enabled us to deliver optimal certified Virtual SAN all-flash options from our broad portfolio of products. ”

Pentaho, a Hitachi Group Company, has released Docker open source utilities to help simplify and speed big data analytics. The Pentaho Server now works with the containerized open source platform to build, ship, and run big data analytics at scale. Pentaho’s Docker utilities are currently available in GitHub.

“The open source foundation of Pentaho allows quick innovation with emerging technologies, so that we may remain autonomous and provide flexibility to developers when it comes to adapting Pentaho solutions into their development and test environments,” said Ken Wood, Vice President of Pentaho Labs, Pentaho, a Hitachi Group Company. “Developers can leverage a scalable testing and development environment to push boundaries in the areas such as IoT, machine learning and predictive analytics.”